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We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

A couple of weeks ago I scored a visit to Lucasfilm and half jokingly challenged the Slashdot audience to invite me to other cool places. Two brave Pixar employees took me up on my offer and showed me around for Slashdot T-Shirts. It's an amazing campus. Thanks to Mark Harrison and Ralph Gootee for showing me "0% of the render-farm" and making me wish that I was talented enough to have a place in such an amazing world. Soon I'll have a cool story to post about the crazy work Mark is doing with mind boggling volumes of data, but for now I have a picture of me next to a giant Luxo Lamp. Also thanks to Heidi Parmelee who gave me a Woody doll to give to my son and made me a hero. So now the gauntlet has been doubly thrown: Who out there in Slashdot-land works somewhere super cool and can give me a tour in exchange for a T-Shirt?

NASA employees can sometimes get Employee-Car Passes to the launches (assuming they don't have to work said launch). I know you can get Causeway 'seating' that way.. someone with more cred might be able to get something closer though.

I can give you a tour of the Quantum building and you can look at our lab with our nifty-keen tape and disk libraries! Even more importantly, afterwards I can take you to awesome pubs here on the Eastside!!!

I'm not a fan of MS business practices but the software has been improving, I got to spend a few days out in Redmond as part of a TAP for one of the System Centre products and whether you like MS or not it's an experience I'd highly recommend to anyone.

Well hey now, guys, look. I do not want to do anything illegal here... but I would kill somebody... in front of their own mama... to get a/. T-shirt. And if any witnesses testify against me, I'll gouge their eyes out.
Otherwise you could come visit the Skype office in Palo Alto.

I literally live right next door to your sister in law Mary cmdrtaco. I hung out with your brother a few weeks ago when he was visiting. You should come down here and give me a tshirt just because I know some of your family personally;)

I can arrange a tour of the 300+ acre SAS Institute headquarters here in Cary, NC if you would like. It's beautiful - and SAS was Fortune's #1 best place to work in the USA two years in a row - last year and this. I think it's a cool place to work!
http://www.sas.com/company/ [sas.com]

You got invited somewhere awesome by a member of the/. community, and all we get is a thank you and a request to be let into more awesome places? It would've killed you to snap a few pictures, or to have set up an interview, or to have given us something, anything, back in return?

Either make a big deal out of it when this happens and do some actual, experiential blogging, or keep quiet about it, but this story is just...a smirk.

I work nowhere remotely interesting these days, but if I did, after this story I wouldn't be inclined to help yo

Yeah, I don't get what this is all about. I thought that when he posted about Lucasfilm last week that he was just doing it on a lark -- I'm pretty shocked to see that this is a regular, erm, feature published here.

Indeed, I don't see the point of these posts from a content generation perspective at all -- I mean, clearly there are 67 comments here so far, so people are reading it. But I bet there are better things to occupy the space than this...

I can give a tour of all the excitement that is the Defense Media Activity, American Forces Network Broadcasting Center in lovely Moreno Valley, California...
We broadcast tv and radio programs worldwide for service-members and their families.

Cool story man! Keep 'em coming! I liked the part where you visited Pixar and took the picture with the ball and there was that lamp right beyond you omg lookout lol hahaha anyway man keep in touch would love to read more on that trip to Lucasfilm! Take care! BTW have you seen my bong? Can't find it anywhere, I'm thinking it's either you that put it in your bag mistaking it for the darker one (yours) or Amanda... you know how she is! LOL ok take care Taco peace out

While PNG is a great format for digital artwork, and maybe even archiving, it's a terrible format for distributing pictures on the web. JPEG, while lossy, still looks good at high resolutions, and compresses down to smaller image sizes for distribution of photography on the web. It's the difference between FLAC and high bitrate MP3... while the FLAC is "technically" superior in terms of quality, most people aren't going to be able to tell the difference between 256kbps MP3 and FLAC.

Not only is it a big ass PNG, it's also in AdobeRGB colourspace - so probably about.1% of the readership is actually able to see it correctly.
and never mind cutting file size by 75%, try 90 or 95%, and that's without even touching the resolution. The only question is why he didn't go the whole hog with a 32-bit image instead of the paltry 8-bit option. (that last bit was sarcasm, or should I say the last 24 bots were sarcasm)
Leading technology web site, eh?
Remind me again of the relevance of slashdot,

No, it really is not substantial. It's there, but you really have to be looking for it.

Besides, this attitude of "with modern X being what it is", we create this computing culture of throwing hardware at the problem when there are performance issues, rather than trying to solve the root issue at hand.

You're missing the point, entirely. The problem with the picture is that it's a photo of Cmdr. Taco touching a giant ball in front of Pixar's HQ, underneath 4 lines of text (on my screen) about his trip. At the least, post a gallery of something, anything and write more about... other things... am I asking too much?

Would the results have been better if both pictures had been based off of the same source picture, rather than the second being made from the first? I was always taught that creating a lossy image out of a lossy image yielded poor results..

We actually met up at the A2 slashdot tenth birthday celebration, so I already have a t-shirt. But, I'm also the admin for Yankee Air Museum [yankeeairmuseum.org] , home to a flying B-17, B-25, and C-47. I offered then, and it still stands. I think something can be arraigned.

...*I* have to put some effort into ensuring *YOU* get as many "away from the office" jollies as you can.

How about you go check out an office chair company on your next expenses-paid trip out? Then when I tell you to go "sit & swivel", I can at least gain some pleasure in knowing you will have a fairly good chance of carrying out my orders.

Incidentally, I'm thinking of taking a sickie from the office on Wednesday next week? Can you call my boss and make up an excuse for me?

a. have a temporary background check and polygraph (previous employer, still have connections for tours).
or
b. willing to sign an NDA (HINT: you may have already did from your last visit. Think parents...).

Also, did they show you the hideouts (i.e. must be 21yrs or over) and did you get to play drums?

TFA has tag: brag written all over it... and hopefully this post does not. FYI, I don't exist.

@Glendale, CA.But it must be before Jun 18 that I go back to Argentina. I am a the "website factory" and it is very cool, but there are also a lot of different sections in the same block and the block in front of that. Email me at sbassi gmail if you like the idea.

If you ever find yourself in West Texas/Southern NM, I could probably give you an insider's tour of a 3.5 meter telescope. If the timing and weather is right, you might get to see an Apollo run when we bounce a laser off the moon. They have some pretty cool computer equipment, including a Dec Alpha running VMS and Lisp to control the telescope motors. I also rather like the 6-8 parallel DAT drives that recorded the streaming take from the SDSS 2.5 meter telescope.

At CERN, the http protocol was born, the Grid Tier0 is hosted, open access publishing was organized, the LHC is operating, other mind-boggling experiments take place every day, and there are free tours.